About Extreme Weather and Climate Change

Scientists are tying more and more extreme events to a changing climate

A new report, published as a special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, provides some of the best evidence yet that climate change already has a hand in our worst weather. It points to a variety of extreme weather events in 2015 that were likely influenced by global warming, from heat waves in Australia to heavy rain in China to raging wildfires in Alaska.

The report, examining research on two dozen weather events, was compiled and edited by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.

Climate scientists have long predicted that the progression of climate change would bring about changes in both the severity and frequency of extreme weather events around the world. In recent years, a new area of climate science has begun to emerge, one that seeks to figure out the likelihood that any given event was influenced by climate change.

Check out these Climate Council reports linking extreme weather events to climate change: